The maet o this transietion wis kent langsinsyne,
nae bother fer mosst o space, like jacks an limb extenders
an aa the bruck o bidan i'the varse, but sheu wis cursed
wi the wrang kinno faimly on the wrang kinno yird...[p. 90]
A verse novel written in the Orkney dialect, accompanied by an English 'translation' that's poetic in itself, Deep Wheel Orcadia won the Arthur C Clarke Award in 2022, and I have been starting and abandoning it ever since.
Two travellers meet on Deep Wheel Orcadia, a space station near the galactic centre but also on the edge of everything. Astrid is returning from art school on Mars, and finding it difficult to fit back into her Orcadian life: Darling is fleeing her controlling parents, trying to find a place she might call home. The folk of the Wheel are struggling with the pace of change and the shifting economics. The primary industry seems to be catching Light(s) from the gas giant the Wheel orbits, and turning those Lights into fuel. But the Lights are not necessarily what they seem, and the wrecks that keep showing up near the Wheel -- studied by archaeologist Noor -- are also a mystery.
It's a very Orcadian story, from the isolated close-knit community once at the centre of things (see The Edge of the World for Orkney's former importance in the North Sea trading milieu) to the small 'yoles' (here spacecraft, historically fishing or whaling boats) going out to catch fuel. (In our book group discussion we talked about the ethical issues of whaling and how they might map to ethical issues with harvesting Lights.) For a novel set in deep space, it's remarkably nautical, and remarkably Norse: I'm sure I spotted Odinn, and the nearby gas giant is referred to as a 'yotun' (compare with 'jotun').
Deep Wheel Orcadia is easier to read than I'd expected, once I got into the rhythm of the dialect and remembered how to read a paper book. (I read ebooks for preference these days: better contrast, adjustable font and highlights that can be retrieved online.) I also listened to the audiobook, read by the author and alternating the Orkney and English chapters: their voice, in every sense, is a delight. I found it easier to understand spoken Orcadian than written: perhaps the Norse-inflected spellings obfuscated the meaning. I did find some of the English 'translations' decidedly clunky -- 'waitstaylive' for 'bide' and so on -- but this may well be deliberate, for one of the novel's themes is the difficulty of understanding, of translating. And indeed this may also extend to the Lights: are the 'visions' they seem to cause really an attempt to communicate?
I like the denseness of the Orkney verse, and the unwieldiness of the English translations, and the contrast between Astrid's sense of unbelonging and Darling's feeling that she could make a home here: I wanted more about the Lights, and the wrecks, and the gods, and Darling's past. And, indeed, Astrid's future, now that someone else on the Wheel has her name... A fascinating, if not wholly straightforward, read.
Fulfils the ‘abrupt ending’ rubric of the 52 books in 2024 challenge.
The quotation at the top of this review is translated as:
The foodmeat of this transition was long since known, no problem for most of space, like jacks and limb extenders
and all the rubbishscrap of waitstayliving in the universe, but she was cursed with the wrong sort of family on the wrong sort of groundworldsoil.
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